Lewis Page
The Register
Monday, June 25, 2012
Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time – and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all.
“Previous ocean models … have predicted temperatures and melt rates that are too high, suggesting a significant mass loss in this region that is actually not taking place,” says Tore Hattermann of the Norwegian Polar Institute, member of a team which has obtained two years’ worth of direct measurements below the massive Fimbul Ice Shelf in eastern Antarctica – the first ever to be taken.
It turns out that past studies, which were based on computer models without any direct data for comparison or guidance, overestimate the water temperatures and extent of melting beneath the Fimbul Ice Shelf. This has led to the misconception, Hattermann said, that the ice shelf is losing mass at a faster rate than it is gaining mass, leading to an overall loss of mass.
The team’s results show that water temperatures are far lower than computer models predicted …
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Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show
Crafty boffins got elephant seals to survey for them
By Lewis Page • Get more from this author
Posted in Science, 25th June 2012 07:19 GMT
Free whitepaper – Enabling Datacenter and Cloud Service Management for Mid-Tier Enterprises
Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time – and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all.
“Previous ocean models … have predicted temperatures and melt rates that are too high, suggesting a significant mass loss in this region that is actually not taking place,” says Tore Hattermann of the Norwegian Polar Institute, member of a team which has obtained two years’ worth of direct measurements below the massive Fimbul Ice Shelf in eastern Antarctica – the first ever to be taken.
According to a statement from the American Geophysical Union, announcing the new research:
It turns out that past studies, which were based on computer models without any direct data for comparison or guidance, overestimate the water temperatures and extent of melting beneath the Fimbul Ice Shelf. This has led to the misconception, Hattermann said, that the ice shelf is losing mass at a faster rate than it is gaining mass, leading to an overall loss of mass.
The team’s results show that water temperatures are far lower than computer models predicted …
Hatterman and his colleagues, using 12 tons of hot-water drilling equipment, bored three holes more than 200m deep through the Fimbul Shelf, which spans an area roughly twice the size of New Jersey. The location of each hole was cunningly chosen so that the various pathways by which water moves beneath the ice shelf could be observed, and instruments were lowered down.
The boffins also supplemented their data craftily by harvesting info from a biology project, the Marine Mammal Exploration of the Oceans Pole to Pole (MEOP) effort, which had seen sensor packages attached to elephant seals.
“Nobody was expecting that the MEOP seals from Bouvetoya would swim straight to the Antarctic and stay along the Fimbul Ice Shelf for the entire winter,” Hattermann says. “But this behaviour certainly provided an impressive and unique data set.”
Normally, getting sea temperature readings along the shelf in winter would be dangerous if not impossible due to shifting pack ice – but the seals were perfectly at home among the grinding floes.
Overall, according to the team, their field data shows “steady state mass balance” on the eastern Antarctic coasts – ie, that no ice is being lost from the massive shelves there. The research is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
This is good news indeed, as some had thought that huge amounts of ice were melting from the region, which might mean accelerated rates of sea level rise in future. ®
Paper in Press
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, doi:10.1029/2012GL051012
Two years of oceanic observations below the Fimbul Ice Shelf, Antarctica
Key Points
- We present two years of unique observations below the Fimbul Ice Shelf
- Cold water below the ice suggests low basal melting
- Solar heated surface water and warm pulses at depth provide heat for melting
Tore Hattermann
Ole A. Nøst
Jonathan M. Lilly
Lars Henrik Smedsrud
The mechanisms by which heat is delivered to Antarctic ice shelves are a major source of uncertainty when assessing the response of the Antarctic ice sheet to climate change. Direct observations of the ice shelf-ocean interaction are extremely scarce, and present ice shelf-ocean models struggle to predict reason able melt rates. Our two years of data during 2010-2012 from three oceanic moorings below the Fimbul Ice Shelf in the eastern Weddell Sea show cold cavity waters, with average temperatures of less than 0.1 {degree sign}C above the surface freezing point. This suggests rather low basal melt rates, consistent with remote sensing based, steady state mass balance estimates in this sector of the Antarctic coast. Oceanic heat for basal melting is found to be sup-plied by two sources of warm water that enter below the ice: (i) eddy-like bursts of Modified Warm Deep Water accesses the cavity at depth during eight months of the record; and (ii) a seasonal inflow of warm, fresh surface water flushes parts of the ice base with temperatures above freezing, during late summer and fall. This interplay of processes implies that basal melting cannot simply be parameterized by coastal deep ocean temperatures, but is directly linked to both solar forcing at the surface as well as to coastal processes controlling deep ocean heat fluxes.
Media Dismisses Warning About Tyranny and Troops on the Street as Kooky
Conspiracy Theory
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 15, 2012
Chad Garrison‘s critique of the news that the Army is driving military vehicles through the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, is typical of the media response to this outrageous event – a local television station’s coverage “really ignited the crazies” in the same way Orson Welles’ War of World radio broadcast did in 1938, Garrison chides.
Garrison, who writes for the River Front Times, neglected to note that Welles’ drama was pure fiction, whereas the troops on the streets of St. Louis are real.
In addition to lambasting Zero Hedge and other sites covering the deployment, Garrison singled out Alex Jones who he sarcastically states produced the video below “from a basement bunker.”
Mr. Garrison’s inability to understand the significance of troops on the streets is sadly normal behavior on the part of the establishment media (and much of the alternative media, as the River Front Times is billed as a St. Louis “alternative”).
In fact, we note today, many residents in St. Louis are praising troops on the streets. According to a Fox 2 St. Louis report, “people who live and work in the area think the army training is a good idea.
Abhorrence to standing armies is spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, a document many Americans unfortunately do not know and would not understand if they bothered to read it.
######
“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty,” James Madison warned during a speech delivered at the Constitutional Convention in 1878. “The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
In a letter to Madison penned in 1787, Thomas Jefferson lamented the fact that the Bill of Rights does not include a restriction on standing armies. “The following [addition to the Bill of Rights] would have pleased me,” he wrote. “All troops of the United States shall stand ipso facto disbanded at the expiration of the term for which their pay and subsistence shall have been last voted by Congress.”
“The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force,” he wrote to Chandler Price in 1807.
The “training” conducted in St. Louis is yet another example of the state conditioning us to the presence of a standing army in our midst. It has little to do with al-Qaeda or phantom terrorists. It is, as Madison noted, an instrument of tyranny designed to enslave the people.
For more on this, see Chuck Baldwin’s post breaking down the threat to liberty posed by standing armies.
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